The Road
by MiddayFiddler
Summary: I've been walking this road and hoping that on the end of it, there would be redemption. Or forgiveness. Or something. But there is only your old house and you never returned.


I walk the road every day.

Once in the morning, with eyes clouded with remnants of sleep and a pillow pattern carved into my left cheek, not to disappear until the world was relieved from the last crumbles of night. Keys in the pocket of autumn jacket. Gym clothes in a bag. Lunchbox always forgotten, every single time, and coming back from halfway to take it had become more of a custom than a reminder of my forgetfullness. Sometimes the sun wasn't up yet and the pale green streetlights were flickering solemnly with rattling noises, as if the ghosts of morning were bound inside them, calling for help. I didn't listen. I didn't care for the morning to come, or the road to end, or the sun to appear. It did appear, the rays of colour of blushed cheeks on the grey skies that seemed to be falling down in desperate attempt to crush the waking world. Sometimes dots of snow.

You said it reminded you of me. You said the line every single time, repeated it to the point it ceased to be endearing and turned into predictable and cheesy. I didn't care. Predictable was easy and good, just like you waiting on the crossroad in front of your house, checking watch on your wrist just to have something to do, wearing that smile that didn't belong to this time of day or to me. And I thought that maybe before I had come to meet you, you had gone around and released all the morning ghosts and they had blessed you with everything you had been blessed with. Sometimes I wondered if I could have joined you. I never did. I was the one that came after, until one morning, none of us did come.

(I've been praying for redemption, I've been.)

The evenings were simpler, quicker and coloured in orange and ink blue of falling night, smelling of dew and pine needles. There was familiar ache in our muscles and heaviness in our steps, both of ours synchronized to the rhythm of silent ticking of your wrist watch, the ones that broke right after the entrance exams and right then, I knew. And we stopped in front of your house and you looked at them, because you didn't want to look at my face. I think so. I've wondered for years before I realized that you could have read me like an open book and even if you couldn't have, some things are hard to hide. And then you were gone and I walked the road and the streetlights were flickering once again, surrounded by aureolas of tiny flies flying in circles around the scalding lightbulbs. I was thinking about whether their pale light was making my face almost translucent and whether under it, I would remind of a ghost whose guarding duty was divided between your house and mine.

(I'd been praying for many things, once.)

The streetlight are there no more. There are others, with slender metallic bodies that smell of emptiness and ice and burned plastic. Their light is warm and welcoming, so bright you can hear the colour and the colour is hued in orange like autumn sun. The flies remain, but there is glass divide between them and the lightbulb and their dance of desire doesn't end in agony anymore. There are no ghosts. Not in the morning when I take the road, not in the night when I take it again. There is a black cat, and once I liked to pretend that maybe she was the guardian of that place, a lost soul who left only to come back. I stopped. People don't come back after they left and sometimes, ghosts don't, either.

(I've been walking this road and hoping that on the end of it, there would be redemption. Or forgiveness. Or something. But there is only your old house and you never returned.)

The time lost its count somewhere on the sidewalk. It feels like being trapped in a time loop, with the same road and the same streetlights and the same thoughts that come back like flies come back to the light, until they burn into ashes and cover dried grass together with snow. I lie to sleep on the right side, only to wake up with the pillow carving on the left cheek, just like it always was, as if I was forever eighteen and waking up for a morning club and leaving lunchboxes on the counter. And meeting you on the crossroad, with your smile and your watches and everything I've ever wished for and you did get, because that is how universe works. Somewhere along the way, I forgot what it felt like, to wish, and all I can recall is that I've always dreamt of you sleeping on the right side of our bed. And that I've never bought watch on my own, because you were the one who always had time and it left with you.

I walk the road every day and sometimes I pray for your happiness, too.

(It never occured to me that maybe you were looking at the watches to hide your face.)

* * *

><p>AN: My headcanon is that Suga won't get into college and will stay behind in Karasuno.


End file.
